Here you are spending a few moments searching through your */bin folders for some interesting programs and you spy something that brings back fond memories of your dos days. "WOW!" You think. "I found my favourite Norton Commander program." Excitedly you type "nc" only to be disappointed with a prompt saying "Cmd line:" and not the familiar split screen interface of the venerable shell file browser. Rest assured there is a Norton Commander style shell file browser for Linux but that is another story. This "nc" program thingy actually stands for NetCat and is a very useful program for the system administrators and security guru's of the electronic world. This program does for the network what "cat" does for the shell command line. In other words it takes a file and streams it to the console. Whereas "cat" streams to the default console, "nc" streams the file over the network. The beauty of this program means that you can easily copy files, the output of other programs and even complete disks across the network. Not just linux machines either. Windows, unix and apple machines can be "catted" in this way. If you want a simple chat between computers then "nc" can do it. If you want to back up a disk without shutting down the 24/7 server then "nc" can do it. If you want to push files out to client computers then "nc" can do it. This program can act as both a server and a client. Admittedly there are other programs that when combined can do what "nc" does and do it easier. There is no program that can do all of the things that "nc" can do in a miniscule 20k package. This program is perfect for putting on a floppy disk (are there any still in use?) or thumb drive for your hacking toolkit. There are many examples out on the internet for how to use "nc". Here are a couple of quick links found through google. How-To use NetCat a TutorialNetcat - a couple of useful examples

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I've always been fascinated with graphics and wrote my first drawing program on the venerable apple ][e. After discovering the x86 IBM clones and wrangling my way into the computer industry I'm now immersed in work as a Computer Engineer, System Administrator, OS builder (Linux from Scratch and Android) and general techno-head.